Bill W. Bill W.—no last name needed—is familiar to any kid dragged to a church basement on a Friday night and told to quietly eat butter cookies while grownups take turns talking about how their obsession with alcohol repeatedly, unceasingly, keeps ruining their lives. Bill's the long-dead co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and he's revered as something close to a personal, tangible messiah among the hard cases who cling for dear life to his books, his "higher power" mantra, and his now-ubiquitous 12-step program. At a time when alcoholism either led to jail or the asylum, Bill W. offered a way out. But the singular—and perhaps most powerful—message that oozes from Bill W., an occasionally slow-moving documentary probing Wilson's life, is a simple, inescapable fact about the man: He was just another alcoholic. DENIS THERIAULT Cinema 21.

Frankenstein You probably feel like you've seen the 1931 horror classic, even if you haven't. But this is still the greatest filmed interpretation of Mary Shelley's novel, transformed into a gothic melodrama anchored by Boris Karloff, who finds the perfect balance of tender and terrifying as the mad scientist's stitched-together creature. It's more sad than scary these days, but Frankenstein remains undeniably powerful. NED LANNAMANN Hollywood Theatre.

Frankie Go Boom Frankie's recovering drug addict brother goes to extraordinary lengths to humiliate him in the dark comedy Frankie Go Boom. For as long as they've been brothers, Bruce (Chris O'Dowd) has made home movies of Frankie's (Charlie Hunnam) mortifications. When drunken pixie dream girl Lassie (Lizzy Caplan! In a bikini and rainboots!) crashes into Frankie's life and Bruce makes an embarrassing video of their burgeoning crush, the brotherly love gets even thinner. It's fair to say that a butt-ton of hijinks ensue, and if you can ignore its cringe-worthy ending, Frankie Go Boom is a pretty decent comedy with a likeable cast. COURTNEY FERGUSON Hollywood Theatre.

The Great Silence A mute Jean-Louis Trintignant faces off against psychotic bounty killer Klaus Kinski in Sergio Corbucci's 1968 spaghetti western. Shot in wintertime snow with plenty of bloodshed, The Great Silence is a bleak, great movie, highlighted by an Ennio Morricone score and a memorably tragic ending. NED LANNAMANN Hollywood Theatre.

Hecklevision: Presidential Debates The debates, with your texts popping up onscreen! This will surely be a very respectful exchange of nuanced ideas. Hollywood Theatre.

LooperLooper is "just" an action movie the same way Brick was "just" a noir, or The Brothers Bloom was "just" a heist flick: All three were written and directed by Rian Johnson, and with each, Johnson appropriates the skeleton of a genre, then fleshes it out in astonishingly clever ways. All you need to know to enjoy Looper is that actions have consequences—and Looper is an action movie. ERIK HENRIKSEN Various Theaters.

The Mormon Church Explains It All to You On 16mm, film historian Dennis Nyback presents "three complete films, and one excerpt, made by the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City between 1964 and 1974." This will probably be bizarre and great. And timely! The Faux Museum.

Night of the Creeps Hey, just like a moonlit stroll in Waterfront Park! Laurelhurst Theater.

The Paperboy Director Lee Daniels' follow-up to Precious is an unholy mess—a lurid, sticky tale of murder and sex set in the Florida swamp. Nicole Kidman, Matthew McConaughey, Zac Efron, and John Cusack try vainly to acquit themselves, but Daniels isn't focused so much on plot or character as in icking out the audience. (Kidman and Cusack send each other to mutual orgasm without touching; Kidman pees on Efron; Cusack rapes Kidman as Daniels intercuts footage of wild animals.) An entertaining piece of trash could have been whittled out of this nonsense, but Daniels opts for something pretentious and incoherent. NED LANNAMANN Fox Tower 10.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower After I read—and completely fell in love with—The Perks of Being a Wallflower, I dreaded seeing the movie. I didn't think I could stomach any changes to such a sweet, sad, and triumphant story. But guess what? This movie totally worked! I still can't believe it. The cathartic Perks captures the sometimes-awesome/always-awkward pains and victories of American teenagerdom in a way that few movies do. ELINOR JONES Various Theaters.

Pitch PerfectBridesmaids' female-driven raunch trickles down to college in Pitch Perfect, a deeply derivative yet totally enjoyable teen movie about a college a capella group. Essentially Glee with swearing and vagina jokes, this movie has about a billion problems, and I don't care about any of them because SONG BATTLES. Bonus: Anna Kendrick is utterly adorable as an angsty wannabe record producer, and Elizabeth Banks is great as a cheerfully bitter contest announcer. ALISON HALLETT Various Theaters.

Premium Rush A film based on the wet dreams of bike couriers everywhere, Premium Rush is one of the stupidest movies ever, which is to say it's both remarkably silly and surprisingly fun. A thriller set in the exhilarating world of... uh... bike couriering, it stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt—the guy your girlfriend likes more than she likes you—as Wilee, a character whose name is (A) pronounced like the coyote's, and (B) nearly as dumb as the phrase "premium rush." Bike courier Wilee, like most people with fixies, never shuts the fuck up about his fixie, and he also says things like "Brakes are death!" and "Runnin' reds, killin' peds." He'd be insufferable if JoGoLev, who is way more handsome and likeable than you, didn't play him. ERIK HENRIKSEN Laurelhurst Theater, Valley Theater, Vancouver Plaza 10.